Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

Her flesh was grilled with scratches and bright lacerations, bruised and striped. On her pale thighs caked streaks of brown blood drew a soft moo of pity from Flower of Life. Zelikman wrung a rag over the basin and cleaned her insofar as such a thing was possible of the stain of her deflowering and of the grime and filth of the Qomr. He bathed her feet, her knees, her neck, working quickly and silently and with no more tenderness than he would have shown to a stranger or a horse, which was not to say none at all, indeed far from it; but his characteristic coolness of manner as a physician seemed to return to him with the revelation of the slight frame and the injuries of the girl.

“This will sting,” he told her, fingers greased with a paste he had concocted from fat and honey and the scanty store of herbs and perfumes the whorehouse kept on hand.

“Good,” she said.

When he was through he wrapped her in a blanket and fed her from a chipped clay bowl, and she was asleep, sitting up, before half the thin soup of peas and mutton was gone. The next morning she woke and ate steadily and wordlessly for half an hour, and when she had wiped her mouth she asked for a pair of breeches and a tunic, and pronounced herself healed and only in want of a sword.

“We're glad to hear it,” Amram said, “but Zelikman and I have talked it over and come to the conclusion that you can't possibly kill Buljan in his present estate. He is too powerful, too strong, too well protected and too well armed. I understand that you want revenge, Filaq. It is an impulse I know and respect. But it must not be heeded. It must be deferred. Now I can see that you're about to open that big mouth of yours and pronounce the word ‘coward,’ and so I have to warn you that if you offer such a mistaken analysis of my character and that of my friend, who though admittedly prone to brooding and self-doubt is braver than any man I have ever known, excepting myself, I will be under an immediate obligation to kick your narrow pink ass.”

She hugged herself and went to the narrow window, the legs of the leather breeches whispering as she crossed the room. She looked out at the overgrown garden, the rusty red leaves of the grapevines, the steely sky, the smoke of the fires that would not go out. Then she turned back to the partners.

“So we must first find a way to change Buljan's estate,” she said.

“That was our thought,” said Amram.

“We don't claim to understand this doubled kingship that you live under,” Zelikman said. “It strikes us as overelaborate.”

“It strikes me as stupid,” Amram said. “Correct me if I have it wrong. As far as I can tell, the bek runs the country, and the army, and the treasury; but the kagan runs the bek.”

“The kagan rarely speaks,” the girl said. “But when he does his word is sacred. Inarguable. Absolute.”

“That's the man we want to see,” Amram said.

Across a river frozen to the depth of a planted spear, along an avenue of blazing torches, drawn by reindeer in a royal sledge with fittings of mica and electrum, accompanied by ram's-horn blasts and harness bells and the scrape of iron runners against the ice; tender contraband, hidden at her father's side in the grandiose reek of a bearskin, with the heat and the weight of him against her and the full moon hanging minted against the sky like a bright dirham: that was the way she had last crossed over to the island of the kagan and the palace where he dwelt in friendless splendor. Now she crossed in utter dark, swimming the river at the last hour of night, naked and freezing, preserved from drowning only by the saving company of gentlemen of the road fated someday to be hanged. Greased with tallow, sidearms strapped to their backs, their clothes tied around their necks in bituminized bladders, huffing, gasping. The river in autumn still flowing swift and in its motion burning colder than ice. When she first slipped into the water on the Khazaran side she felt panic, iron bands and deadweights on her chest and ankles, and then numbness like a toxin in her muscles, a fatal resignation. And then Zelikman's hand reaching for her, dragging at her wrist, shoulder, hair, his voice at once harsh and tender hissing, Swim you lazy bitch.

At the southern tip of the island that was shaped like a letter qof they splashed up a stone embankment and clambered stiff and stumbling like unarticulated iron beings. Unslinging their sacks, they rolled in the grass and shadows of a laurel grove in which, so her father had told her, a kagan new-crowned was forced to his knees and informed, with his neck in the loop of a silken garrote, of the precise day and hour on which he would be returned to the spot and dispatched, by a slipknot, to the afterlife of kings.

Cold humming in her, she dressed hurriedly and led Amram and Zelikman up out of the grove and along the scarp toward the southern or Bee Gate. A peacock screamed. The river rang and chuckled. On the right bank they could see the infernal orange of burning houses, and outlined against the glow the sleeping black cat of a mosque. Beyond the scarp rose a flight of broad stone stairs called the Bee Steps, and then they struck the south gate, stout timbers set into an arch in the circular wall, a massive thing of Byzantine plan promising impregnability but untested by war or engine in all the long years of peace.

Into the massive oak portal a man-size door was cut, and it was through this that the guardsmen charged with defending the gate passed to stand their watches. They were six stout Colchian Guards, black-armored, spread out around the door in the gate. Stamping their feet, asleep with their eyes open, dour mountaineers married to silence and solitude. In her mind she sketched the path that she would cut, if she had to, if she could, if only they would let her, she and her borrowed inferior sword, swinging the blade, whirling, lunging, a zigzag path like the lacing of a buskin. But her life and her actions were never her own and never had been from the first hour of her consciousness and so she left the sword in its scabbard and watched, scowling, as Zelikman, wrapped in black from head to toe, crept up behind the Colchians one by one and fed them through the nostrils one of his magical drafts. They sank to their knees with audible sighs like cursed men released from a spell. She followed Amram out of the shadows and watched impatiently as he used the edge of Mother-Defiler to prize open the door in the gate.

She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence, but even to pass through the Bee Gate into the Alley of Bees was a terrific profanation and perhaps it was the lingering chill of the river in her bones but she thrilled with her first few steps.

They were surprised at the next gate by a huge Turkoman who came out of nowhere, the skin of a tiger knotted by its paws around his shoulders, and lunged at Amram with a steel lance. It passed through the quilting of Amram's bambakion and struck the mail he wore underneath with a muffled spark like a lamp flickering behind a curtain. She flung herself onto the Turkoman's back and with the rank bacon smell of his oiled hair in her nostrils bit off his ear, a salt apricot between her teeth. She had her thumbs in the Turkoman's eye-sockets but before they could know that burst of hot immersion Zelikman was there with his reeking rag and the man drained to the ground like sand running out of an hourglass.

Zelikman shook his head, wearing a look of reproach, and in answer she spat the hunk of ear at his feet and kept on walking, aware as she moved forward of a rushing in her head like a swell of fervent chanting, a wobble in her ankles. She could feel the green tendrils of the sleeping draft twining up the doorposts of her mind. She listed to the side and slammed her shoulder against a stone pillar. Amram caught her and set her on her feet, and Zelikman laid his cold fingers along her temples, and she came to herself But the remainder of the journey to the apartments of the kagan partook of the labyrinthine tedium of a dream, and she was never afterward able to recall it, or to say how, in the darkness, with her last visit to the palace having occurred in her girlhood, with her mind disordered by the draft and the iron flavor of blood in her mouth, she managed to conduct the thieves, with accuracy and haste, to the heart of the heart of her world.